Thursday, May 14, 2009

One more Jester Day!

I hope you've all enjoyed Jester Week. I have a few extra items, so I thought I'd extend the week one more day.

First off, here's a look at an early sketch for the new jester, with the set crew:

The jester herself is in the same pose, but we also have Bobby, the set designer, and Cody, the lighting director doing their thing, with the jester standing up on a half constructed set. The main issue with this one was that the figures all ended up being tiny. The close up of the Jester works better. Less is more, right?

Last of all, here are a few promotional images I did for the theater last year. These were to celebrate the groundbreaking of a new theater building at a place called Midtown Village. The central tower there is the landmark the jester is climbing on. If you look closely at the trunk of the '09 jesters, you can see a tiny version of this.

The jester is holding a shovel for the groundbreaking ceremony. Everyone who came to the groundbreaking got a big print of this. The theater actually had a guy dressed in this very jester outfit running around with a shovel. These images are different from all the other jester images in one major way. Illustrators, can you guess it? Digital coloring. That's right, all the other jesters were acrylic paintings, but the groundbreaking jester illustrations were hand drawn in pencil, then colored with Photoshop. Similar to the way the Jack and Rapunzel books were done.

The sad part of this story is that the ground was broken for the new building, then, of course, the entire world economy collapsed. So the theater is still rocking the old white building (the one in the '07 Jester's hands.) Hopefully, when the economic climate heats up a little, they'll get that new building. We've got big plans for a HUGE jester mural in the lobby, so keep those fingers crossed.